


je suis un nous

by sadlikeknives



Category: Benjamin January Mysteries - Barbara Hambly
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sense8 (TV) Fusion, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 04:21:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17114366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadlikeknives/pseuds/sadlikeknives
Summary: It started with Ayasha's indrawn gasp of a breath, with her grabbing Ben's hand and squeezing, and with Ben realizing, "I see her too."Anne has one last gift to give.





	je suis un nous

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, within_a_dream! I saw your prompt about a Sense8 style cluster and I had to write it. I hope you enjoy this!

It started with Ayasha's indrawn gasp of a breath, with her grabbing Ben's hand and squeezing, and with Ben realizing, "I see her too."

Anne, standing there before them in the green dress she would die in, her hair shorn short, looking almost beatific. "I didn't want it to be this way," she said, and, "My friends, you must forgive me, but there isn't any time."

"What—where am I?" someone asked, and Ben recognized the accent; had never thought to hear it here in Paris, never thought to see a Kaintuck in the ragged, filthy clothes that typified the breed looking around, stunned and confused, and no one else in the crowd looking at him at all. "What the hell's goin' on?"

"You're in the Place de la Nation," Ayasha told him, ever helpful, and when he just looked blank at her, added, "In Paris?" This exchange was all the more remarkable for the fact that the Kaintuck had spoken English, a language Ayasha did not, to the best of Ben's knowledge, speak a word of.

"Paris!" he exclaimed, as Ben became aware of a woman with spectacles, dressed in a conservative dress a few seasons out of fashion and not the bonnet he was more accustomed to in Paris but a tignon, as required by law in New Orleans, looking around in just as much astonishment as the Kaintuck.

Not too far from her, a white man, dressed like he was rich, was laughing like something was outrageously funny, but there was something like despair in his eyes. No one else seemed to pay him any more mind than they did the Kaintuck.

"My children," Anne said, as if Ben were not nearly twice her age, and, "Ben, Ayasha, you must forgive me—if I had known sooner...find Chloe. She will look after you, and explain what I cannot. There is simply no time. Look after each other, please. For me."

Later, when they were walking home, Ben broke the awful silence to say, "He was a Kaintuck."

Ayasha stirred, and then asked, "What?" as if one emerging from a dream.

"The man who didn't know where he was. He was a Kaintuck. You see men like that in New Orleans, come down the river to sell their goods and get drunk. And the woman—they wear headscarves like that in New Orleans. The tignon."

"Then I think, _malik_ ," Ayasha said slowly, "that if there are answers to be had for what has just happened to us, they are in New Orleans."

Ben said nothing, and when it came up again later, he fought it at first. He had sworn, he told Ayasha, never to return to New Orleans. She did not know what it was like. She could not imagine. But by then she and Rose had become fast friends, and Alec and Shaw were in agreement with him that no man could hope to stand against that alliance. The death knell of his protestations came one day when he found himself visiting Alec and he was on a boat, and very drunk. "I'm not Alec any more," he said.

Ben asked him gently, "Then who are you?"

"Sefton. Hannibal Sefton. And I'm going to New Orleans, to find my fair Rose before I die, and to not be a millstone on my family name any longer."

And Ben said, "Oh, hell," and conceded to the inevitable.

(" _Is_ he dying?" Ayasha asked, when he told her about it.

"More or less," was all Ben could tell her. "Those lungs will kill him eventually, but whether the next bout is the one that does it or one ten years from now—who knows?")

Ayasha sold her shop at a very good price, bargaining mercilessly for it, for who knew how long it would take them to get established in New Orleans, and they said their good-byes to their friends and set sail in the spring of 1831. Ben had his doubts about how well they would manage to establish themselves—as he told Ayasha before they set sail, most women in New Orleans, in his experience, made their own dresses. She just scoffed and said that he underestimated the power to be had in the words "had her own shop in Paris" (and as she usually did, she turned out to be right). 

The journey was long, of course, and one day on the boat Ayasha was experimenting with various methods of tying the tignon she was soon to have to adopt, using some scarves she had bought in Paris for the purpose, as Ben read from one of the books they'd brought with them, when he heard Rose say, "No, not like that, dearest," at the same time as Shaw exclaimed, "Whoa, no!" and he looked up to find Rose's hands already unfashioning the crown of seven points Ayasha had unwittingly worked the kerchief into. Not for the first time, he wondered at the technicalities of their condition: he could not be the one manipulating the cloth of the tignon, for here he sat across their tiny cabin, having been ignorant of the problem until just now, and Ayasha's hands surely could not have reached to make the adjustment Rose was doing now. Yet the tignon was being untied all the same.

"Was that bad?" Ayasha asked.

"Only if you're not a voodoo," Rose said.

"I have four other people in my head. Who is to say I am not?"

"We're somethin', all right," Shaw agreed easily. "But not voodoo. Mamzelle Marie don't need nobody but herself in her head to know everybody's secrets, although most of that's from dressin' hair. Then again some of it may well be from that giant snake of hers, I don't rightly know."

"Mamzelle Marie?" Ben asked. "Marie Laveau is queen of the voodoos now?"

"You know her, maestro?" Shaw asked.

"My sister studied with her."

"Your sister's a voodoo, Ben?" Rose asked. "You never said."

"Well, I don't know what she's doing now. I haven't heard from her since I left for Paris."

"We'll have to look her up when we arrive," Ayasha declared, examining Rose's reworked version of the tignon in Ben's shaving mirror. "I wonder what she will make of us."

"I guess we'll find out," Ben said softly, and Ayasha waved one hand at him vaguely.

"All will be well, you'll see. You worry too much."

When their ship arrived at the docks in New Orleans, Ben's mother was nowhere in sight, not that he had expected her to come. There were three people there to greet them, but none of them would dare approach just yet: a tall, rangy Kaintuck in a coat Ayasha swore she was going to burn, a down-at-his-luck musician with a mustache and a bad cough, and a bespectacled scholarly free woman of color, buying pralines from one of the vendors nearby. They would figure it out, Ben thought. They were all here now. 

Also come to meet them was Ben's half-sister Dominique, all grown up from the last time he had seen her, beautiful in the full bloom of youth and, he had heard in a letter from his mother before he left Paris, newly engaged as _placee_ to one Henri Viellard. Ben felt a strange sensation of doubling when his eyes met hers across the way, and then she was there, greeting him warmly, embracing Ayasha as a sister, and then she said, "Oh, Ben, I am so very sorry! If I had known it was you—but of course I don't think poor dear Anne appreciated how little Chloe could do from inside the convent school, and she never guessed you were my brother! Why, it's like I was telling Hiromitsu the other day--" and then she was off and running, and eventually he and Ayasha were able to work out that Dominique was not only like them, and had been since she was fifteen, she was a member of the same 'cluster' as Anne Ben-Gideon and Chloe St. Chinian, an heiress who was likely to have to marry the same Henri Viellard Dominique was _placee_ to. Dominique's cluster was, it seemed, both larger than theirs and more wide-spread, and she was thoroughly delighted to learn that they had not, as she had thought, come to New Orleans to find Chloe (Anne had apparently managed to tell the rest of her cluster she'd told her 'children' to find Chloe before she died, but hadn't realized, with what was going on, that she hadn't given them any clear instructions to do so), but rather to find the rest of their cluster, who were already here. She insisted they have the others over to meet them properly at her house: "Henri has given me the most _darling_ little cottage, dearest, although you must forgive me for not having it fully furnished just yet!"

Ayasha smiled at her sister-in-law and said, "I don't think that will be a problem," as Rose walked up to join them and tucked a praline into her hand.

"Here," she said, "try this."

"You see?" Ayasha said to Ben. "I told you everything would work out all right."

They would see, he thought. But so far, New Orleans seemed to be working out pretty well.


End file.
